If all goes as planned, at the other end of the weekend we'll have a site that's richer, more engaging, more dynamic, easier to navigate, and ready to reflect all the coolness and quirkiness that Columbia Citizens bring to it.

it still takes so dang long to download, even though we have fast service.

Yesterday it did seem like pages loaded slower than normal.

The site pulls lots of data: from feeds, from google, from flickr, and from lists generated within the site. The Wikli is especially image-intensive. I'll see whether we can call smaller versions of the images — that might make a difference.

Another problem, which I've now fixed: the site layout was calling images I'd neglected to supply. Maybe that was causing some delay as browsers waited for the missing images (?).

Try something like the built in element inspector in safari on windows or mac. Fairly consistently for me the load time of the front page is over 1s (often over 1s of latency from msft corpnet), peaking over 5s for that first page. So that's definitely going to be a problem. Looks just as slow to me as it did yesterday.

It's definitely faster and that tweet makes sense since it look like your original long pole was latency waiting for the first page to come back. I still think its still a little slow. There's one script file in particular that tries to do some custom domain login thing i didn't look into that looks to be the long pole now, bit it looks like all wikidot stuff